Tag Archives: African Americans

This is the third post in a series that started because of a white person’s question on Facebook: What have whites ever done to blacks — after slavery — to keep them from succeeding? Don’t they have exactly the same opportunities as we?

(For this post I rely heavily on Ned and Constance Sublette’s eye-opeing book: The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry.)

In America, one of the main ways to build assets is through home ownership. In the previous post I already laid out the many ways government on every level, together with the housing industry, kept African Americans segregated from whites, how they kept them out of middle-class neighborhoods and how they refused to give them mortgages. A century of segregated neighborhoods, racially restrictive covenants and redlining have left African Americans far behind where home ownership is concerned.

If we’re going to talk about real estate, though, to really understand the scope of the injustice done to African Americans, we need to go back to the very beginning of white land use in America.

So, white people in America enslaved black people for life, and their children were born into slavery for life, etc, from 1619 to 1865. These people built half of America, they cleared the land, farmed it, built the houses, made the tools with which to do it all, without pay, more often than not on minimal rations, in rags for clothes, and they were whipped and beaten and … Yes, yes, we know all that, you say.

I’m glad. But in this post I want to focus on real estate and other forms of asset-building as they were related to slavery.

New England was established by Puritans — Protestants who fled England during the Catholic reign. They had a strong work ethic and did things themselves. Potential colonists who wanted to join them were required to have letters of recommendation from people in England. They had a diversified economy that included agriculture of every kind as well as industry, and they quickly built cities that became the economic centers. New England always had a lot less slaves than the South for these reasons. Also, crowded cities didn’t allow for much room to house a lot of extra workers. The Northern states had slavery, but they never had a slave economy.

The South, on the other hand, starting with Virginia and Maryland, was founded by ‘Cavaliers’ — the royalist gentry from England during the Protestant reign. They liked to live high and let their servants do all the work. Jamestown (founded in 1607) was an abject failure at first because it was the destination for fur traders and gold-crazy men who had fallen for get-rich-quick sales back in England, who weren’t the least bit interested in growing their own food, and it was run by men who knew nothing about building or agriculture or anything a startup colony needed.

Eventually the Virginia colonists settled and were successful, growing tobacco. Or rather, they had slaves who grew the tobacco for them. Even though the colonies were the crown’s property, the governor allowed the purchase of land to keep the planters motivated to produce, and to produce more. (Because the English had immediately become addicted to this tobacco.) And so Virginia got its real estate market.

Land, however, was worthless without workers, since the Cavaliers weren’t going to lift a finger themselves. The governor quickly recognized that the principal wealth was servants. The ‘headright’ system was introduced in Jamestown in 1617: planters would be given fifty acres for every indentured servant for whom they’d pay the crossing. The servants were the poorest of the poor from the English cities, malnourished and not able to do the hard labor for long, but it was a way for planters to quickly amass lots of land. This is how the division between the rich and poor whites developed in the South. In addition to the indentured servants, Virginian planters bought slaves, who were taken from West Africa, to work the land. These people also counted for the headright, until 1699, when it was limited to transported English citizens. The governor was worried, both that whites were becoming a minority and that the fast expansion westward was creating tension with the Native American peoples.

There were two models of slavery: the Latin model saw slaves as immovable property, like real estate, belonging to the plantation. (That’s why Louisiana slaves were much better able to keep families together; Louisiana was French and then partly Spanish before it became American.) The Anglo-Saxon model, on the other hand, allowed slaves to be considered chattel, movable assets that could be sold separately. This saw an increase when Virginia put a stop to primogeniture in 1777. From then on land and other assets were divided up between siblings after a parent’s death, instead of all staying with one person. That meant more slave families were broken up as well. Soon creditors began lending money to planters who put up their slaves as collateral. That’s how Virginia developed a slave-based economy, with slaves as its common currency.

In 1663 Carolina became the third Southern colony, where Cavaliers negotiated with King Charles II for even more land per servant imported (150 acres), including slaves. Half of those Cavaliers were members of the Royal African Company, which was in the business of acquiring slaves in Africa and shipping them to the colonies. So Carolina was set up with a slave economy from the start. All that was needed to acquire land was slaves. Getting land and becoming a slave-owning planter was the main goal for most whites in the Carolinas, even up to the 1860s. It was how the rich planters kept poor Southern whites from revolting too much; they told them that at least they were better than slaves — hey, who knows, maybe they would own slaves themselves someday and be planters, too.

The colonies didn’t have any official common currency. Folks used Spanish gold coins and silver Mexican pesos, but there was no steady, dependable American money until after the Civil War. By 1850, after the California Gold Rush, the Northern states had their own paper currency based on the gold standard, but the South wanted nothing to do with it, because all its wealth was in slaves. Slaves were the South’s most reliable currency.

So the South had no manufacturing, no diversification. Their technology was backward, because worn-out slaves were less likely to revolt — having them do everything by hand instead of with modern machinery was just fine. All the tobacco, cotton, sugarcane and rice plantations were worked by slaves. The land was useless without slaves. Slaves were currency with which to buy land, they worked the land and produced the crops, and they were collateral with which to borrow money to invest in more slaves and more land.

Slaves also bought political power thanks to the three-fifths clause. Once America had won independence, it became clear that the North and South had widely different interests. Both wanted to expand the territories, but the South primarily so they could expand their slave market, the North because it wanted parts of Canada. The only thing they had in common was that they wanted the British out and the ability to protect their property from the British military. The Constitutional Convention was a heated gathering, to say the least, and the Constitution was a compromise between the states and a future federal government, with the South not compromising all that much.

The South would only provide soldiers to fight the British on the condition that they got to keep slavery. Virginia and South Carolina, the wealthiest states, also wanted representation based on wealth. One of the compromises was that there would be two senators from each state, which made the non-slave-owning states happy, and the number of congressmen was based on the population of each state, with a slave counting as three-fifths of a man. So, the more slaves one owned, the more say one had in government. This made the slave-owning states happy. The South’s only compromise was that their slaves didn’t count 100% but 60%.

My point with this is that the large plantation owners, who were the richest people in the country and the largest property owners, depended for their wealth and power — the power to expand their territory and their slave market — entirely on the number of slaves they owned.

By the beginning of the 19th century the African slave trade had ended. (Big power struggle between the slave-breeding state of Virginia and the slave-importing state of Carolina — long story, but Virginia won.) In the Deep South, on the sugarcane, cotton and rice plantations, life was so hard that many slaves were worked to death. The crops were seasonal, and since there was little else going on — no economic diversification to speak of — it was cheaper to have as few slaves as possible literally worked to death during the season, and buy new ones the next year than to have more slaves so that they wouldn’t have to be worked to death. Because those surviving slaves would then have to be housed, clothed and fed during the off-season.

In a way the plantations of the Deep South were America’s version of Germany’s concentration camps, only much earlier, on a much larger scale, over a much longer period of time, and privately run. Unlike in the Nazi concentration camps, the goal on the Southern plantations wasn’t genocide, of course; the planters would have told you that it was simply a matter of economics.

Virginia and Maryland were in the tobacco business, but because the climate was milder and tobacco was a less brutal crop to grow than sugarcane and cotton, slaves lived longer and had children. Thomas Jefferson referred to the children of his slaves as ‘natural increase’ — interest on his investment. So Virginia, and to a lesser extent Maryland, had become slave-breeding states, providing the slaves for the Deep South. (What that entailed for female slaves and families was a whole different nightmare.)

The economic bust of 1839-1840 illustrates to what degree the South had become a slave economy. The wheat harvest in England failed and Britain had to spend its import money on food instead of cotton. Suddenly the price of cotton dropped, having no overseas buyers, and therefore there was no reason to plant it, so suddenly slaves were not worth as much as they usually were. This was the first and only time that the value of slaves dropped. They went up again, but since the federal government was slow in being able to pay in specie, there was a shortage of coin, so large mortgage notes were sold to investors in England and the Netherlands, who knew they were investing in slaves. In Mississippi one such a mortgage paid five million dollars in coin.

In the 1840s the expansion of American territory and the opening of land for cultivation meant that there was always more need for slaves to work the land than there were on the market, thus keeping their price up. The land produced cotton, but only if slaves worked it, so slaves were actually more valuable than the cotton they produced on the land they worked.

Like any currency, the value of slaves had to be kept strong. Slaves were used to buy land, so land had to be available to be bought. This is one of the reasons the existing slave states fought hard for every new state to be a slave state as well — by the 1850s the existing slave states were reaching their saturation point and if they didn’t expand, the system would collapse in on itself. Before the Civil War started, the South was looking to take Cuba next, and then move into Central and South America. The other reason to maintain slavery was so the Southern states would keep their collective majority in Congress — European immigrants were quickly increasing the population in the North.

By 1860 heated debate was going on among the Southern states about secession. One of the arguments for secession was that freed slaves would rape and murder all the white women, but the most important argument was monetary. The Deep South felt it had to secede because it had a completely slave-based economy, and the American government would abolish slavery sooner or later. Stephen F. Hale, Alabama’s secession commissioner, stated it clearly: “African slavery has become not only one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern states, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property, worth, according to recent estimates, not less than $4,000,000,000; forming, in fact, the basis on which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these states.”

To make a centuries-long story short, by the end of the Civil War in 1865, most of the land in the South was owned by a relatively few rich planters and others who had acquired their real estate and any other wealth using their slaves not only as labor, but, even more importantly, as currency, as collateral for loans and mortgages, and, in the case of the slave-trading states, as a good investment that created its own interest — Jefferson’s ‘natural increase’.

President Abraham Lincoln had (somewhat vague) plans to break up the plantations and give forty acres and some livestock to all the freed slaves after the Civil War, but he was assassinated before he could realize those promises, so we’ll never know if he actually would have. What we do know is that the plantation owners got to keep every bit of their vast properties and that the Black Code and Jim Crow laws and practices prevented many if not most freed slaves and African Americans in general from owning land in the Southern states, often until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s — a full century later.

This was a little intro to the next post, which will deal with wealth disparity between Whites and Blacks in America.

Sources:

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry / Ned and Constance Sublette. – Chicago : Chicago Book Press, 2015.

Headright. – Wikiwand. – https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Headright

How Colonists Acquired Title to Land in Virginia / VirginiaPlaces.org. – http://www.virginiaplaces.org/settleland/headright.html

The first African-American disadvantage I want to address is housing, because housing determines access to education, healthcare, jobs, fresh vegetables, even, and the ability to build assets. (For an introduction, see the previous post.) A lot of white people think, or like to think, that de jure segregation, i.e. based in law — the official segregation of blacks and whites — was something of the Deep South and the distant past, and that the segregation we see today ‘just happened’, because of black people’s personal choices and circumstances — that it’s voluntary, de facto segregation. Continue reading →

A while ago I saw someone ask, somewhere on Facebook, “But what have whites done, since the Civil War, to prevent blacks from succeeding? Why do we owe them anything?” So I got to work, thinking I’d write a post in which I’d neatly sum up, chronologically, all the ways whites have worked to systematically exclude blacks from the American dream. Continue reading →

Two days ago a sixteen-year-old girl at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina was using her phone in class. The teacher wanted to take the phone from her. She refused. The teacher then asked her to leave the classroom and go to the principal’s office. Or, rather,–I’m guessing–he ordered her. She refused. Continue reading →

What Folks Have Been Reading

Archives: The Whole Shebang

Archives: The Whole Shebang

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING

The Indigenous nations of North America practiced slavery for various reasons, but once the Europeans came, it became commodified in a way that looked a lot more like the human trafficking we know today. The damage it did to the entire continent is mind-boggling.

In the late 60s Richard Proenneke built his own cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with only a few simple tools. He spent most of the rest of his life there. Sam Keith fleshed out Proenneke's diary of his first 16 months, when he was making his home by a lake. I love these kinds of books!

An old Oji-Cree healer and her nephew canoe down a river in Canada, away from the world of white people. They both have to come to terms with their past. The woman has lost most of her tribe and the young man is traumatized from his recent experience in the Belgian trenches of World War One. My second book by Boyden. Can't say enough about him.

An incredibly comprehensive history of everything related to slavery in the Southern United States, from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. Over 700 pages and I took over 30 pages of notes. I will be sharing over many posts to come!

Hamid's debut novel. I love this author. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, is the victim of love, drugs, obsession, the class system and his complete lack of self-awareness.

A golem, created in Poland and brought to life on a ship to America, and a jinni who was trapped in a flask a thousand years ago and released in New York -- the most unusual immigrants you'll ever meet.

The only part of her life a Korean woman can control is her body, so she withdraws into it. Harrowing.

Autobiography lightly disguised as a novel about the son of Southern migrants growing up on the streets of Harlem, New York City, in the 1940s and 50s. Written like you're hearing the whole story in a bar. Quite a feat.

The story of a man struggling to make a living in Morocco. No plot, no clearly defined characters, but fascinating in its authenticity.

Four generations of black women in Louisiana, from a kitchen slave in the 1830s to a 'free' woman during the Jim Crow 1930s. What they had to do to survive, to keep what they could of their family together. Powerful.

Pakistani man tells an American about his experience as a college student and employee of an assessment firm in America years ago. Smart, nuanced and pretty darn honest considering the unreliable narrator.

Wow! The answer to the inane platitudes about how all parents love their children and how children should always respect their parents. The protagonist must come to terms with his deeply flawed immigrant parents in order to change himself.

Seven short stories about life during the Kim Il-sung regime, by a writer who still lives and works in North Korea, were smuggled out of the country and translated. Mind-boggling stuff.

A 15-year-old autistic narrator wants to know who killed a neighbor's dog, and ends up much further out of his comfort zone than he planned. Wonderful read!

In politics, education, religion, agriculture, business--it turns out that dumbing down has been here from the start.

Fifty years of Istanbul seen through the eyes of a street vendor who migrates to the city as a young boy. It's also a window into the complicated dance between men and women in Turkey.

Hey, don't laugh, at least I'm trying.

A Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with six other people on a tiny island off the coast of Maine all winter in 1873. A woman in the present researching the Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with three other people on a tiny sailboat. What could possibly go wrong?

A man stuck between two worlds in more ways than one. Fascinating!

Historical novel about early contacts between first nations and the French in Canada. Beautifully written story that doesn't pull any punches. I bought his other two novels right away.

Beautifully written. By my children's favorite English and Creative Writing teacher! It's got rave reviews and we're all very proud of her.

"What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off. "

Suki Kim is a Korean-American journalist. She poses as an evangelical Christian posing as an English teacher at a school for the sons of North Korea's elite. Her experience and the information she manages to get via writing assignments are incredible. Definitely a lot more eye-opening that any CNN special.

This. Explains. Everything!!!

Why has Islam not undergone a reformation like Christianity? Why is it so easy for Islamic extremist groups like IS to recruit young muslims? What would it take for Islam in fundamentalist Islamic countries to enter modernity? Does the West have a role to play?

Amazing! A man wanders endlessly through a dreamscape, becoming other people, himself in the past, everything is fluid. Kafkaesque disconnect between people and their different needs.

A multi-layered novel about the history of Libya. A fast read, but one you can repeat and find something new each time.

Twelve Americans go missing in Burma/Myanmar during a tour. Touching and hilarious, but mostly hilarious.

The quote on the front mentions that these stories are exhilerating. I couldn't disagree more. They are almost unbearably painful to read, and yet I couldn't put them down. Very well done, apart from the third story, which is written in the second tense. Please let me know if you know of ONE story that works in second tense.